This panel's goal was to develop the means to improve teachers' ability to perform general and specific skills of teaching within curriculum areas and student development levels. The panel focused on research to improve teacher performance of instructional skills and identified two basic approaches to this research. The first approach dealt with…

This report deals with the issue of inservice teacher education and discusses in detail several new ventures and projects located in the Des Moines geographic area. The report reflects the views of several individuals--representatives from the Iowa State Education Association, Des Moines Public School System, Polk County Board of Education, and…

In this speech, Role Based Teacher Education (RBTE)--a form of generic Competency Based Teacher Education (CBTE) programs proposed in the sixties--is described. It is stated that RBTE is designed to be an adaptive process for professional development in teaching. The RBTE prototype developed and reported in this speech is delineated into a…

Teacher Centers began less than ten years ago in England. The English Teacher Centers are governed by the teachers themselves and are financially supported by the local educational authority. The various centers have two functions in common: (a) curriculum development; and (b) inservice education. In the United States, there are at least 4,500…

This report describes the various faculty programs at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Parkland College (Illinois). In response to faculty professional development needs surveys, these programs and activities were designed and created: (1) classroom assessment and research courses, which empower faculty to focus on learning by…

The number of teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has grown exponentially in recent years, with many teachers describing the experience as exceptional professional development. This study examined what teachers might learn from the assessment process. It compared and analyzed the recorded interview…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the confidence levels of new teachers and related factors. Seventy-seven first and second year teachers participating in a new teacher retention project filled out a survey. Teachers felt most confident in their communication with colleagues, sensitivity to the needs of a multicultural classroom, and…

This study examined the attitudes toward secondary school of 631 adolescents attending 8th, 9th, and 10th grade in Parana, Argentina in 1998. Students completed a scale of 12 questions about the value of school and their teachers' capacity to teach and to establish good relationships with their students. Overall, most Argentinean students showed…

An increasing number of corporations are using some form of experience-based outdoor training and development. Most of these programs follow a general process that includes: (1) introduction of the activity by the facilitator; (2) the experiential activity (during which the facilitator is observer or safety monitor); and (3) debriefing or…

Successful classroom questioning is an art that can be cultivated through practice. While teachers do use questions in classroom interaction with students, these questions tend to be lower order questions which only require recall or comprehension on the part of the students. Research suggests that teachers favor these lower order questions for…

The study reported in this paper is the first phase of a projected multi-phase, multi-year inquiry designed to explain how professors think about, and go about, teaching. This preliminary phase examined the attitudes of 15 faculty members in 5 disciplines (anthropology, English, history, mathematics, and psychology) toward the teaching aspects of…

To prepare a course on "Communication Skills for the Community College Teacher" a literature search and a focus group interview on the topic of effective community college lecturing was carried out. The literature search revealed shortcomings in the literature on lecturing, which tends to be oriented to secondary school or four-year…

Although inappropriate computer experiences emphasizing things more than people are frequently introduced into elementary school classrooms by inadequately trained administrators and teachers, computers can be appropriately used to liberate or empower thinking abilities. Certainly, computers should be used for specific reasons, but…

The Florida Master Teacher Program has added two new levels of certification for teachers: the associate master teacher and the master teacher. Only the associate master teacher level has meaning during 1984-85 since one must have been an associate master teacher for three years before becoming a master teacher. To become an associate master…

These materials for workshop use are intended to enable teacher educators to describe a process for developing measurement instruments from competency statements and their related objectives; to recognize, describe, and discuss basic assumptions underlying the measurement process; and to develop behavioral indicators to be used in the assessment…